Friendlier, cheaper colleges in south see surge in freshmen from northeast as students shun Harvard and Ivy League over progressive chaos

Freshmen from the Northeast are flocking to Southern universities because they are cheaper, friendlier and not torn by progressive politics.

According to the Wall Street JournalThe number of Northerners attending Southern public schools has increased to 84 percent over the past two decades. Between 2018 and 2022, this figure increased by 30 percent.

Students are drawn south in part because public universities offer cheaper alternatives to northern schools.

But the exodus is also being driven by teens who want to avoid the intense political polarization plaguing Ivy League campuses in New England and New York.

For these prospective students, the sense of community that football Saturdays represent in the South is particularly enticing.

Throughout American history, ambitious high school students have tended to set their sights on Ivy League schools.

Although their private southern counterparts, such as Duke and Vanderbilt, have always attracted northern scholars, the recent trend of students heading south has caused many to choose public universities.

Since 2002, interest in popular Southern institutions like Clemson and Georgia Institute of Technology has outpaced interest in Ivy League schools, according to the Journal.

During the same period, applications for Alabama increased by more than 600 percent. Applications to Harvard — which has been rocked by anti-Semitist claims in the wake of the October 7 attacks and the Israeli bombing of Gaza — have increased only 200 percent over the same period.

Covid accelerated the trend, with closures and mask mandates lasting much longer at Ivy League colleges than at their Southern counterparts.

Mitch Savalli, a freshman at Georgia Tech from Long Island, shared Wall Street Journal that he was drawn to the school after witnessing his older brother’s difficult experience at a college in Upstate New York.

Mitch’s older brother attended the school during the pandemic. He was subjected to routine lockdowns at the university after being exposed to Covid.

There were also mask requirements, social distancing rules and online classes he attended in his dorm room.

During this time, the Savalli brothers watched college football games with students throughout the South cheering on their teams in person.

“There were more freedoms in the southern schools and that really drove enrollment,” Vincent Pisano, an assistant principal in the Long Island district where Savalli went to school, told me. WJ.

‘Then the reach from the southern schools really started to grow. Schools like LSU and South Carolina started attracting large groups of kids,” Pisano said.

In the Savalli school district, applications to southern universities have tripled compared to a few years before the pandemic.

However, this district is not unique. Federal data shows that while the number of students choosing Southern schools was already growing, growth accelerated after the pandemic.

“You had students at home in their basement in Connecticut looking at their phones and seeing that most of the Northeast was closed and not much was happening,” Rick Clark, executive director of strategic student access at Georgia Tech, told me. WJ.

“At the same time, they see fraternities and sororities in Alabama and football games in Georgia and Florida. Life happens,” he continued.

Cheaper tuition at southern colleges acts as a further incentive for students from the north.

According to the WJLast year, Southern schools that ranked among the nation’s top 100 public research universities charged significantly less than colleges elsewhere.

“Southern schools charged students from other states an average of $29,000 in tuition and fees, the least among the top public colleges in any region,” the Magazine noted.

Mitch Savalli originally hoped to attend Tufts, where the out-of-pocket cost is about $80,000. At Georgia Tech, the financial burden is half that.

Many teens are also drawn south because they want to participate in the area’s boisterous Greek life, according to college counselors.

On Instagram and TikTok, members of student clubs and student associations offer fun insights into their world.

Meanwhile, Northern schools have often featured prominently in news reports over the past year about campuses in the crosshairs of intense protests.

College counselors argue that this crucial combination of atmosphere is another reason why an increasing number of teens are choosing to move south to attend school.

Colby College sociology professor Neil Gross said students who move south to attend college pay less attention to politics than those who attend schools in the Northeast.

“Some students say, ‘I don’t want to be in a super political environment,’ and they choose an atmosphere where they can focus on things other than politics,” Gross said.

Rachel Rubin, co-founder of Spark Admissions, a private college consulting firm, shared WJ that bitter student protests over the war in Gaza have pushed some elite Jewish and Southeast Asian schools in the northeast to dismiss.

‘They are paying much more attention to which Ivies they apply to and are expanding their search to the rest of the country.’

Fascinatingly, many parents who come to visit their children at Southern colleges end up moving there themselves, a practice known as trailing.

They are attracted by the good weather, friendly atmosphere and cheaper properties, but also by the proximity to their loved ones.